What Is LabVIEW?

NI LabVIEW software is used for a wide variety of applications and industries, which can make it challenging to answer the question: "What is LabVIEW?" NI has heard many conflicting opinions and debates over the years. This paper discusses what LabVIEW really is.

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I thought I saw an ad for LabVIEW on the eetimes.com website, so naturally I wanted to check out this white paper to see what it was all about. Wow. This white paper could really, really, really, really benefit from a tech editor. And that tech editor should slap the hand of anyone at National Instruments who tries to change fonts again. "What is LabVIEW?" the paper asked. Yeah, what is it? The paper bravely tackled the question head on: "NI LabVIEW software is used for a wide variety of applications and industries, which can make it challenging to answer the question: 'What is LabVIEW?' I have heard many conflicting opinions and debates over the years...." And it went on that way. Sigh. It's too bad. The ad looked very attractive (if I didn't imagine it).

I am one of the original members that developed LabVIEW. I was responsible for all the math, DSP and analysis libraries. While I was in graduate school, I did a lot of DSP and Imaging. So my personal goal was to make high performance processing blocks to build diagrams much like we did in school.
With the popularity of multicore, I decided to write a book on G programming, LabVIEW's programming language. The book is available here: https://www.lulu.com/commerce/index.php?fBuyProduct=4810847
What I like about LabVIEW, or G if you will, is that you can quickly build multicore programs without having to be a multicore programming expert. G provides the syntax that any programming language has and has the benefit that you can quickly see the parallelism in your code, which is difficult to "see" in text based languages.
LabVIEW provides the text and graphical tools to build some cool applications. Just ask the Lego folks.
Regards,
Eduardo Perez, Ph.D.

Despite all the perceived hype about LabView, being able to program in graphical building blocks is a very useful engineering-friendly design methodology, as are others such a MathWorks. Any programming language that gets away from laborious text commands to friendly graphical interpretations is worth investigating. In the world of multicore parallel processing designs it just makes more sense.